arXiv:2607. 14192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As recommender systems mature in the past few years, their optimization objectives have evolved from a primary focusing on short-term behavioral signals to a broader emphasis on long-term user engagement and retention.
By Dingsu Wang, Filip Ryzner, Kelly He, Armando Ordorica, David Woo, Aditya Mantha, Liyao Lu, Usha Amrutha Nookala, Haoran Guo, Jiacong He, Olafur Gudmundsson, Matt Chun, Krystal Benitez, Dhruvil Deven Badani, Yijie Dylan Wang
The paper introduces Latent Order Bandits (LOB), a new bandit framework that relaxes the strict assumptions of traditional latent bandits by only requiring a partial order of action preferences within each latent state. LOB allows instances sharing the same state to have different reward distributions as long as the action ranking remains consistent, making it suitable for scenarios like user groups on streaming services who agree on genre preferences but rate differently. The authors present an upper‑confidence bound algorithm for both total and partial latent orders, provide regret bounds, and propose a posterior‑sampling variant that empirically outperforms full‑prior latent bandits when reward scales vary across instances sharing the same latent state.
By Emil Carlsson, Newton Mwai, Fredrik D. Johansson
arXiv:2609.37800v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Many recommender services repeatedly encounter cold-start cohorts, where new users arrive with little or no interaction history. This creates two cha...
By Serafima Lebedeva, Sumantrak Mukherjee, Ali Arshad Sadal, Ilias Ek\c{s}i, Rahul Sharma, Julia Mueller, Theresa Dombrowski, Jakob Karolus, Viktor Bengs, Eyke H\"ullermeier, Sebastian Vollmer
arXiv:2602. 17976v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In active sequential testing, also termed pure exploration, a learner is tasked with the goal to adaptively acquire information so as to identify an unknown ground-truth hypothesis with as few queries as possible.
By Alessio Russo, Yin-Ching Lee, Ryan Welch, Aldo Pacchiano
arXiv:2608. 11560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalizing marketing messages with contextual multi-armed bandits (CMABs) drives real business value, yet the objective that ultimately matters - a downstream conversion - is observed only weeks later, too late to drive online learning.
By Sang Su Lee, Vineeth Loganathan, Shishir Dash, Vijay Raghavan
arXiv:2608. 06750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative refinement has significantly enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) performance; however, existing methods ranging from feedback-based Self-Refine to traditional bandit approaches often rely on static options or overlook the saturation effect.
By Shion Ishikawa, Pablo Loyola, Young-joo Chung, Yun Ching Liu